March 01, 2010

I'm totally not bragging about this, but my teeth are pretty white. There are many, many things about myself that if I could wave a magic wand I would fix, but the color of my teeth aren't one of them. (I would, however, make myself five inches taller because it is SO annoying that everyone in my family is tall and I'm 5'3". I totally got the short end of the stick on that one. Think of all the ice cream I could eat without gaining weight if I was that much taller!) But even though my teeth are definitely on the white side, every six months or so I like to use an over the counter whitening product to help freshen them up a little and make sure they stay that way. This time around, I chose Rembrandt's Whitening Strips. To use them, all you have to do is swirl some water around in your mouth for 15 seconds or so (I guess to give the strips a better surface to stick to) then take the strips out of their daily packages and put them on. Unlike other whitening strips that I've tried, Rembrandt's have these sort of tab things on them that you fold behind your teeth to keep them in place, which was a little tricky the first time I used them, but which totally makes them stay in place. You leave them on for 30 minutes, which is the perfect amount of time to read a magazine or watch a trashy reality show (hello, "Keeping Up With the Kardashians"), then swirl your mouth with water again and peel them off. (This is kind of important because I found that if I didn't swirl the water around my mouth, the strips stuck to my teeth and were hard to take off). There are a few things that I really liked about the Rembrandt strips over the other ones I've tried. First, they're mint flavored, which means that even when you're wearing them, there's no weird medicine taste. It just kind of feels like you've gargled with mouthwash or chewed a piece of gum. Second, a lot of other strips I've used may not need the extra step of using the water to get them off, but all of them seemed to leave a lot of the teeth whitening gunk (I'm pretty sure "gunk" is the scientific word for it) behind on my teeth, which is actually kinda gross. With the Rembrandt strips, I didn't have that happen, which I really liked. The box comes with 7 strips for each of your top and bottom teeth - the normal course of treatment is 5 days, but the instructions say that you can use the full week long treatment for even more whitening, so I totally did that. I didn't have any issues at all, except for a little sensitivity on my teeth for the first 2 or 3 days, but that usually happens to me when I use any of these products, so it didn't really bother me. I'm really happy with the results, too. Although my teeth were pretty white to begin with, these strips definitely made them a shade or two lighter and they're a little sparklier (always nice). Definitely worth the 3 1/2 hours of total wear time that it took over the course of a week. (Plus, it gave me an excuse to find out what Kim, Kourtney and Kloe have been up to).

You can buy Rembrandt's Whitening Strips in your local drugstore or on drugstore.com for only $23.99.

A sample of this product was sent to me by a PR representative working with Rembrandt.